SEO Specialist

SEO Specialist. There are a lot of them (supposedly) out there in cyberspace. Some will promise you the earth with guaranteed rankings and quick results. But how do you know if you can trust them to:

a) Achieve the results they’re promising you in order to attempt to get your hard earned marketing budget
b) Implement your SEO strategy using only ethical SEO practices (which therefore wont come back to bite you in the proverbial bottom down the line)

Also (and this is probably the most important point): How can you trust a company that guarantees ranking results in the first place?

A good SEO Specialist can do a lot for your content, making it visible and valuable. However, there is a lot of due diligence that you need to do before hiring a company to ensure that you have the right SEO Expert for your business needs.

By asking important questions of your prospective SEO Provider, you are helping yourself to make the right decision, a decision that will increase your success rate, drive you up the rankings on Google (hopefully to one of the top positions in a decent timeframe), and give you an excellent ROI on your SEO investment. Afterall, that’s why you are looking for an SEO Expert!

So, we’ve put together a few questions to ask your SEO Expert before you hire them:

1. You say you’re an SEO Specialist. How much experience do you have?

Most companies advertising SEO services will have some experience, which is obviously critical for them to provide you with the service. Make sure they have enough experience to satisfy your requirements. Also, if you’re concerned that your industry is different from most find out if they have experience in search engine optimisation in your particular area or industry. The more knowledge and experience the SEO Provider has in your industry, the more confident you can be that they will be able to deliver high-quality results for you.

Experience also means that it they will be able to handle the project efficiently to help you identify what needs to be accomplished within your budget and time frame to achieve your SEO goals and rank with or above your main competitors

Listen to how your SEO Specialist handles this question to help you assess your skills for your expectations.

2. What SEO techniques do you use?

Most SEO Specialist will use a combination of different techniques to get your site up into the top rankings over time. After all, Google has approx 200 different elements that they’re judging your website by and comparing it with your competitors to decide who’s get’s to the top of the pops and who’s doesn’t.

These include things like responsive design, page loading speed, content writing & optimisation, backlink building etc…the list goes on.

Ask questions to and relate to explanations that you already know about the techniques they know about what they are talking about. Even if you do not know anything about techniques, you can check them out later and explain the answer you need to determine if the specialist is right for your project. Each time it is useful to know as much as possible about techniques and tools for making informed decisions.

3. Are there any SEO techniques that you avoid?

This question will primarily help you know if your proposed SEO Specialist is familiar with techniques that can cause problems with your site’s search engine. These are known as blackhat SEO techniques and need to be avoided at all costs.

An SEO expert who deals with this question using harmful and illegal SEO strategies such as spamming, use of infection pages, filling in hidden texts is to be avoided at all costs. If Google discovers that these blackhat techniques have been undertaken on your website, they may end up deleting your site from their index altogether.